(statenews.com): In the age of the iPad and all things digital, it only seems natural that our traditional textbooks are making their way online in the form of e-books. Open-source e-books in particular, which are free and available online for anyone to use, offer up a compelling alternative to old-school textbooks, but do they really have the potential to be a serious contender?

(scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org): Focusing on reducing costs and improving efficiencies, many publishers have implemented services to redirect rejected manuscripts to related journals within their field. Apart from reducing the redundancy of having a paper shepherded through the peer-review process a second or third time, internal manuscript and peer-review referral services offers real value to the submitting author - i.e., faster publishing.

(belfasttelegraph.co.uk): The rise of the digital age has brought with it a wealth of new types of products and new ways of interacting with them. Nowadays we've got MP3 players loaded with music, ebook readers containing the latest novels, iPads and smartphones, downloadable videogames and web applications. All these modern products are essentially still just that: products. A company makes them and sells them and eventually they end up in the hands of you, the consumer.

(latimesblogs.latimes.com): When Apple unveiled its iPad in January with its full-color high-resolution glory, many assumed it would be end of story for Amazon.com's Kindle book store and its black-and-white reader. Turns out the iPad has actually helped Amazon. Not only are sales of the Kindle device expected to grow 140% this year to nearly 5 million units from 2009, but digital book sales via the Kindle store are on track to grow 195% to $701 million in 2010, according to Cowen and Co., which released a report Monday on the digital book market.

(huffingtonpost.com): There has been much talk about the decline, and some say inevitable death, of the publishing industry as we know it today. Central to this argument are the rise of e-book sales and the increasing options available to authors to self-publish.